Almost everything is a choice. The difference is that sometimes you're making a rational one and sometimes you only think you're making a rational one and to outsiders and in retrospect it obviously wasn't the best choice, or event a good choice.
There are two aspects to the type of question that was asked. How do you prevent people from ha I g to make choices which are rational and good for their options but still really bad overall, and how do you convinve/educate people about available options they weren't aware of so they don't make outright bad choices when better ones are available that they are unaware of.
There are many possible answers to "why did you take off to the west and ride trains and sleep in parks and steak to feed yourself", but most of them aren't "well I just felt like leaving my entirely stable, loving and supportive friends and family." What to an outsider seems like a poor choice to a specific person imight seem like the decision that saved their life, even in retrospect.
This question jumps past the more fundamental question of whether policymakers, and the government in general, should prevent people from making their own choices.
Education is a very different story which ends with letting people make their own decisions after (hopefully) having more information about realistic outcomes.
I don't personally want a government preventing me from making my own choices. That line is blurry for sure, like if my decision directly negatively impacts someone else for example. But if packing up and riding the rails or sleeping in parks primarily impacts only me, the government shouldn't be able to stop me because they "know" its the wrong choice.
> This question jumps past the more fundamental question of whether policymakers, and the government in general, should prevent people from making their own choices.
When your choices include terrorizing businesses and being a public nuisance to everyone else, then yes, government should prevent people from making those choices.
We already have laws for theft and similar crimes. You don't need a government creating more rules preventing entire categories of choices from being made, especially if they already can't enforce the laws on the books.
I'm not advocating for the US legal/criminal system at all actually. The prior comment was pointing to crimes already being committed by people who make or made certain choices. My only point was that further regulation may not be a great solution when the activities being done are already illegal and going unenforced.
Personally I'd rather gut the legal system and drastically raise the bar by which people are locked up as punishment, but that's beside the point.
I don't see how you are saying anything different.
You seem to agree that punishment and violence is the primary tool of American government, and then you want to use it to control more choices. Call me cynical, but I expect that's how it will be approached. Theft and vagrancy is already a crime. Maybe it was the punk music that led to those so let's criminalize that as well.
In a healthy society there would be no need for intoxicants with so severe harms (BBC list for substances by harm is a good reference) and thus no exposure for a addictive substance.
Now the norm decides that, almost without exceptions, we must all be exposed.
That’s an impossible to prove opinion without changing the laws of physics. But there are some precedence we can refer to as a counterargument.
1. There have been plenty of other substances that have been banned which were legal and widely taken since before such laws existed. Demonstrating that governments are willing to control substances that were previously legal.
2. There have also been other drugs that have been legalized after they were previously banned. Proving that governments are willing to accept the risk of people taking drugs.
3. And your augment about alcohol specific actually did happen in some places. It is commonly referred to as "prohibition". And that decision never stuck.
The reality is drugs aren't legal nor illegal based on solely the harm they do. They are judged based on how easy they are to regulate (read: monetize and tax) and the subsections of society which enjoy them.
To expand on that last point: there's a reason cannabis was illegal in most countries while cigarettes weren't. And that reason wasn't because cannabis was considered more dangerous than tobacco. It's was because certain leaders wanted us to think that the people who smoked cannabis was more dangerous than the people that smoked cigarettes.
> 3. And your augment about alcohol specific actually did happen in some places. It is commonly referred to as "prohibition". And that decision never stuck.
> Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, alcohol has been strictly banned in Iran, where consuming, producing, or selling alcohol is punishable by prison, floggings, and fines. Despite the official ban, Iranians still drink foreign and homemade alcoholic beverages that are sold on the black market. Over the past year, there has been a spike in the cases of fatal alcohol poisoning, according to medical officials in Iran.
And I'm pretty sure few Europeans nor Americans would want to mimic the laws seen in those Islamic countries. Even putting aside the depressing rise of nationalist parties in the west, Saudi and the US and EU are just culturally very different. So what works there isn't necessarily going to work here.
You've completely missed the point. People don't drink alcohol because it's healthy. Just like people don't eat cake because it's healthy, nor drink coffee because it's healthy.
They do it because the unhealthy effects are desirable.
Which is why moderation is the key. There's absolutely nothing wrong with someone enjoying a drink. But there is with people who need to drink. And that's just as true for sugar addition and caffeine addition too.
Now I'm not suggesting that the negative effects of all vices are equal, because clearly they're not. But suggesting that total abstinence is the answer completely misses the point of why people enjoy a drink to begin with. You're setting an unreal expectation that will never work with society. Just like telling people that they shouldn't ever eat cake or drink coffee would be an unrealistic demand on society.
We already have a mountain of evidence that prove the removal of said vice without solving the underlying problem only drives people will just switch to something else. Often that "something else" can be much much worse. So it's far better to give people outlets but ensure there is support to ensure they descend into dependence (and the vast majority of people do consume in moderation).
> I was only using your own framing. You're the one who lazered in on health.
Actually no I wasn't. It was shrubby who mentioned "health" in the medical sense. I was replying to them using "health" in the social wellness sense. ie making the point that "health" is a nuanced term and shouldn't be used in an absolute way like they, and yourself now too, have done.
Health isn't just about physicality. There are social and emotional benefits. For example, enjoying a beer, or glass of wine, with my wife on a Friday evening when we rant about work is a great way to unwind for the weekend. It improves our mental health to have that shared experience. Our relationship is closer for spending time together. It has a net benefit despite it being an unhealthy treat.
You could replace the `wine` with `cake` in statement and have a similar point. But I don't personally enjoy cakes. Also take notice of how I'm not telling you that you shouldn't eat cakes because I don't personally like it ;)
> With alcohol this is well established to be false.
Again, you're missing the point. People enjoy stuff that isn't healthy, but sometimes that can still promote other benefits. Such as mental health. "Health" is a broader term than you give credit for.
Also the links you shared do not prove your point. There's no actual data in either of them. It's just pop-science articles with zero substance designed into scaremongering people. For example their arguments that it takes just one drink to become an addict is just laughable. The real statistics they don't print show a very different story where occasional to moderate drinking is not going to significantly increase your risk of cancer nor anything else. You're talking about fractions of a percent in the change of risk -- and that risk was already a low percentage to begin with. This is where understanding how statistics actually work makes a difference ;)
For example, some studies studies only show a correlation in 5% of cancer cases being related to alcohol consumption and that was proven against heavy drinkers. And the percentage of drinkers who have that cancer are < 1%. eg
And a lot of these studies exaggerate what I'd classed as a "light drinker". Take that link I shared:
> Even light drinkers can be at increased risk of some cancers. For example, women who have just one drink per day have a higher risk of breast cancer than those who have less than one drink a week, and risk is increased even more in heavy drinkers and binge drinkers (3-7).
If you're drinking 1 drink per day then you have a dependency. That isn't occasional consumption. I would not class that as demonstrating moderation. If you need to drink every single day then you fall into the category I described in my previous comment when I said there is an underlying problem that needs addressing.
Most people do not drink every day.
---
So to summarize:
- light and occasional drinking is a rounding error of 0 in terms of physical health risk. But it can have much more significant positive effects on mental health.
- understanding the actual statistics and how they work matter if you're going to argue about the risks to health
- people don't become alcoholics from one glass of wine
- if you don't want to drink then I agree nobody should force you. But please don't share bullshit pop-science articles claiming we're all going to become cancer-riddled addicts from an occasional drink just because you don't understand why some people do enjoy the occasional glass of wine. That just demonstrates you don't understand the subject matter.
- and please don't ignore the parallels I made about coffee and cake. They demonstrate the hypocrisy of comments where people claim absence is the only smart choice.
(and no, those bullet points were not AI generated)
edit: sorry for all the crappy grammar. I'm multitasking...badly it seems haha
I'm tempted to start the full deontology and Jellinek model on substance abuse on this, but don't have the effort now.
If we perform a cost benefit analysis on alcohol the downsides are plentiful and then some.
And the pluses are practically masked versions (taste, buzz,...) of the two major things that make human do anything: what others are doing and what I'm used to (which are pretty shit reasons to do anything IMO) it basically boils down to addiction. Not chemical, but functional and social.
Then we return to the cost benefit analysis and start figuring out how far the lying disease has progressed. The fierceness of the debate feels like a good indicator of this usually.
I'd be tempted to explain this more in depth, but I have stuff to do.
I actually don’t disagree with some of that. But that’s not the point I was discussing.
Let me put it another way: banning something that most people use sensibly and enjoy in moderation isn’t a society that anyone wants to live in nor should live in. I'm sure you'd be the first to complain if the government went after something you enjoyed that caused harm to a minority of other people.
Which is why I keep coming back to the cake analogy. The only reason people eat cake is because of the buzz and taste. Which are pretty shit reasons to do anything in your opinion. And people do get addicted to sugary snacks. Some people even eat for comfort. But a lot of other people do have self-control. Should we ban cake for everyone regardless? Of course not!
As I said in my earlier comment, the problem with substance abuse isn’t the alcohol. The alcohol is just a tool. If you banned alcohol today then people who want escapism will switch to something else. And we’ve seen this trend time and time again throughout history. And it's what any experienced doctor of medicine will also tell you.
So if you want to understand the problems of alcohol abuse better, you need to first understand what drove people to abuse alcohol. Banning alcohol isn’t a shortcut to solving that problem -- despite how much you might like it to be.
Also accusing all people who drink, even those who only do so occasionally, as being addicts (as you literally have done) is so far wrong that it’s just insulting.
Banning something that has so huge disadvantages, but has been lobbied just like cigarettes is exactly the kind of society I want to live in.
But the choice is not mine, so in that way I win.
It's a social norm and a poison from my POV and just like pfas or plastic in the drinking water I believe it should be controlled and the lobbying banned. Then we'd see the true wish of humanity.
Now our needs are manufactured, not around our wellbeing, but for what "must" be lobbied and advertised.
The norm is manufactured. Just like the addictive algorithms and almost any other thing in this world of pseudo-free will.
Even the likes of Joe Rogan are bringing up the issue, with many others so I see some light in the tunnel for my society, but so far you're right. Your side seems to be winning.
> Banning something that has so huge disadvantages, but has been lobbied just like cigarettes is exactly the kind of society I want to live in.
Alcohol isn't like cigarettes. It's more like coffee or cake in terms of the social aspect. You clearly have huge prejudice against alcohol as a whole, but you need to understand that the vast majority of people who drink, do not drink like the minority of people you associate with alcohol.
Also, cigarettes haven't been banned. Their sale has just been hugely restricted. Which is also true for alcohol.
> Now our needs are manufactured, not around our wellbeing, but for what "must" be lobbied and advertised.
You're now just reiterating the same point I made elsewhere ;)
> Your side seems to be winning.
It's not a battle to win. It’s about choice and support. You are responsible for making your own choices. But you shouldn't be dictating how others should live their own lives.
The way a healthy society works is you give people opportunities and support, and the freedom for individuals to make their own choices. However what you're advocating is taking those choices away for everyone based on your own personal prejudices of a small few. And that's not a world anyone else wants to live in.
You also keep ignoring my point that the actual subsection of society you have a problem with (alcoholics) are the same subsection of society that needs support first. If you simply take the booze away, then their underlying mental health and addiction will just drive them to switch to different substances. And if you solve their condition first, then alcohol no longer is the problem you protest so strongly against.
Simply put, you really don't understand the thing you have such a strong opinion about. And it's evidenced by the fact that you keep sidestepping the real issues behind alcohol. But you still want to restrict peoples freedoms regardless.
You're now making a rational argument against an irrational condition.
As I keep saying: the underlying causes behind alcoholism is something that needs to be specifically addressed if you don't want alcoholics to simply switch to something worse.
This is why support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous talk about people's lives and their struggles. They aren't trying to address the access to alcohol, they address the mental state that drove people to abuse alcohol.
This is the key part you keep ignoring. Making alcohol illegal doesn't solve these issues. People will still find a way to get smashed. And there's proof of this in Saudi and Iran where black markets thrive. The proof is also with people in the the EU, UK and US who keep switching from one recreational drug to the next as governments ban new substances in a game of whack-a-mole.
What you're trying to do is treat the symptom, not the cause. And that's why I keep disagreeing with you.
Root cause is the human biases and lying due to cognitive dissonance? And alcohol is a symptom that's easy to grasp.
You’re talking about waterfall management by laws and I’m talking about individual consciousness and the capability of understanding our biases? I guess that explains the perceived differences.
I stated earlier that I really don’t have the resources for this discussion in extent, but I’m leaving a draft for a blog post based on this too. I’ve been creating a matrix of different human habits to perform the cost/benefit calcucaltion. For alcohol and for practically anything individuals do.
I’ll try to sum it up here really quickly and hope for you to provide the pluses, should you have those, for alcohol. You already mentioned with strong emphasis that its normal thus right. And I don’t think either of the “facts” that we’re used to doing something (like smoking, before it was approached with honesty) or because others are doing it (like social media on the predatory and attention wrecking platforms) are good reasons, but I’ll accept that these are pluses to you.
So based on the homo economicus narrative we are rational and will make a rational choice, right? Then this matrix (a quick draft, for reference only, I hope you give me more minuses here than the buzz, the norm and the herd instinct) should work as the guiding light. https://imgur.com/a/NgV6dt9
Then we have the homo ephicus (ethical human with a twist of brutal praxis) that knows that human “mind” is actually an intuition making decisions and strategic reasoning and excuses and post-hoc justifications (thanks Jon Haidt & Hume) we use to lie to ourselves and to our societies.
So with the lingo of THN:
normal =! right
human =! reason
human === lying
But sorry, I can’t do this more clearly as the homo economicus world is putting immense pressure on the cog, I’m positioned to be. I’ll keep you in mind should I have the time to make this bit better.
I’ve never argued against the negative psychology of the minority. And understand the how it affects substance dependence. In fact I’ve talked about the psychological effects of addiction many times before on HN and have studied it in detail. Likely more than yourself owing to the fact that I also know there’s a chemical dependence component of alcohol addiction in the worst cases, which you’ve neglected to mention.
But I was never talking about addicts. I was talking about the majority of people who drive. And this is why you keep getting replies from me after your silly strawman arguments that all drinkers are alcoholics who need the government to save them.
The point you keep ignoring is that you’re repeatedly just talking about the minority and them extrapolating that like it’s equivalent to smoking. And that is simply just your own prejudices in action.
Take the cake example I keep making and you keep ignoring. People comfort eat. People get addicted to sugar. People get fat from sugar and cause a huge burden on health services, and cut their own lives short. But you’re not advocating the outright ban of sugar. Why? Because it can be consumed responsibly. And that’s the crux of the matter.
And even if we take your silly pop-science comparison with smoking, the end conclusion is still the same; smoking isn’t illegal either. It’s just heavily regulated )just like alcohol already is). So by your own silly comparison, you’re effectively just arguing for the status quo.
>In a healthy society there would be no need for intoxicants with so severe harms
Yeah but we don't live in a healthy society. We have more abundance and more advanced healthcare and drugs than ever before, but we are sick in terms of missing social connections and family unit, even in big cities. Hence why mental illnesses and substance abuse are going up.
People don't thrive on GDP line go up and cheap large screen TVs. People need friends, family, and a support network.
Yes. 100 percent agree. The addiction industry requires us to be desperate and wanting an escape, so that they can brainwash us into complicity and brain fog from hangover or doomscrollin.
And the substance abuse is a progressive lying disease so once we figure out "this has gone too far" the threshold for abuse has been crossed a long time ago in most cases.
First the close ones see the problem and the individual in question is the last to see it. Thus a lying disease.
I don't think humans are so straight forward. We have an instinctive nature to rebel that's not going anywhere, and we're all just so absurdly different, so what works for one person or family, may fail spectacularly for another. My opinion is that all you can do is be honest about things. DARE, for instance, ended up resulting in more kids trying drugs after all was said and done. It relied heavily on exaggeration and misleading statements - a lot like contemporary politics. And once people realized some of what was said was lies, the entire foundation fell apart and it all became seen as a joke.
So for instance I'll happily tell my kids that marijuana is enjoyable and relatively harmless in and of itself, yet you end up smelling bad, it ruins motivation, hurts your short-term memory, gives you the munchies, and is just generally is self-escapism, like most drugs. Gotta work on my exact pitch there, but that's the spirit of the point - honesty. They will make plenty of bad decisions in life, but I'd rather that with each one they see I was right, rather than see that I was lying or exaggerating - driving them further away from everything else I taught them.
> you only think you're making a rational one and to outsiders and in retrospect
In retrospect? It's really not hard to determine before the fact that petty crime is not a road to good things.
We have ways to prevent people from going down this path. It's called enforcement. He was more or less allowed to steal and sleep in the parks. If there was strict enforcement, this wouldn't have been a medium term viable option. Doesn't have to be throw the person in prison for the rest of their life, but either accept help, go through the criminal justice system or figure out another way to contribute to society in a positive way. It sounds like the author at any point could have found some kind of employment, but chose this because it was viable. And society wasn't doing him any favors by looking the other way
Enforcement is right of boom, essentially a safety net for the negative external affects of a person having already made a series of choices that resulted in an enforceable outcome. My impression from the thread is a query to identify the things that can prevent an enforceable outcome in the first place.
While one might say strict enforcement would discourage particular behavior choices. I would not disagree and add that suppression of behaviors is not as effective as replacement of behaviors.
This is how a chunk of people function anyway. There are plenty of people that choose to not install "point zero" release for software of a certain importance, assuming with any major changes there are often bugs that come along with it.
In this case, since the number of cool down days is configurable, even if everyone was using it we would still likely see a somewhat smooth curve for adoption, since not everyone will choose the same delay and the delay time will likely map closely to how people want to habdke risk.
It's all a trade off, just like it's always been. This just makes it simpler to act on what you want your risk/comfort level to be.
To keep with the analogy, isn't that sort of like testing two cars by having them both drive the same few hundred foot stretch of new road at the posted speed limit of 35 MPH? You will test some things doing that, but not particularly well, and hardly all the things people find interesting and useful for comparing the performance of cars.
To bring ng this back to the discussion at hand (and to be redundant, as it's been mentioned here already), there are many aspects of using an LLM that are not purely about the output from a single or few well formed prompts. Additionally, if the end results are very similar, these othrr aspects will have an outsized influence on people's perspective of the tools, as they're the only differences worth choosing one model over another.
We don't, since we're not implementing a UI from scratch, we're matching something else.
Of the two possible worlds where in one this reimplementation matches what some see as annoyances in the interface or in another they mostly match the interface except for a few cases where the purposefully diverge (for no good technical reason), IMO the latter is far worse and causes more enexpected behavior.
At most, add a special flag to opt into different default behavior so nobody is surprised by running the same command on different systems and getting different behavior.
To be absolutely clear, since on reading this later it may come across as me masquerading as part of the OpenBSD project, I am not affiliated with them. My "We don't" was in response to "If we have a chance to change rsync defaults" which we, as the general public and users (and very likely also any reimplementors) don't have that chance, because rsync has a solid UI that people and tools have integrated for over a decade, and that's not something you can just change.
Even if this law just caused companies to put into their sales contracts that they will support the servers to a certain date X years in the future and then handling of the online services would pass to a third party that might charge a nominal fee to administer the service, that would be an enormous win for the free market (in that it makes obvious what was ambiguous about a good) and for people both better knowing how a good will function in the future and what future costs there might be. In a way, this could just force companies to provide the equivalent of a warranty for the functioning of the online aspects of the software.
People far too often forget the absolutely vital aspect information plays in the free market, and anything that increases information (for example, how long a good should be expected to continue to function) is a net good, when compared to a complete lack of information about that.
> Just releasing code to users would be a pretty serious abrogation of creditor rights.
Would it, if legally required at the point of sale of the good the source code is based on and utilizes? I doubt creditors claiming ignorance of state law works well as a defense.
If they did that, people would notice, it would be talked about, and it would be factored into (some) people's decisions on whether the game was worth the price. That's the market figuring out how to appropriately price a good based on information about it, which I think would be good. Even if that's the only thing this legislation changes I think it would be a good change, by forcing what was an ambiguous aspect of the good you purchased into a well understood and legally enforced aspect.
Of which year? GTA6 has been in development so long they could miss that period slightly in a year and decide to wait for the next year and polish it up and they likely wouldn't run out of things to fix or make better.
> So, the company makes the promise "we'll have ready by November". They make this promise in April.
Make smaller promises but make them more often, and shit changes more often. Be clear about features 3-6 releases out, and when and why features get bumped. Companies delivering software are already doing this because they often can't deliver in 6 months and telling the customer it will be in the nest release a year from now does, as you note, make them stop doing business with you, so instead now you can tell them it's just delayed by a few months which they can maybe deal with.
Games don't really work like this, but games also don't seem to really work the same way at all and have different incentives.
There are two aspects to the type of question that was asked. How do you prevent people from ha I g to make choices which are rational and good for their options but still really bad overall, and how do you convinve/educate people about available options they weren't aware of so they don't make outright bad choices when better ones are available that they are unaware of.
There are many possible answers to "why did you take off to the west and ride trains and sleep in parks and steak to feed yourself", but most of them aren't "well I just felt like leaving my entirely stable, loving and supportive friends and family." What to an outsider seems like a poor choice to a specific person imight seem like the decision that saved their life, even in retrospect.
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